The Eagles’ landmark 1976 album Hotel California did as thorough a job as any of highlighting the decadence and chaos of the West Coast scene at the time. With its closing track, the band took a broader look at the area, going back to the past to see where it lost its purity.
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Don Henley was largely responsible for that closing track, titled “The Last Resort”. The song has since taken its rightful place among the finest album-closers in rock history.
Built to “Last”
Right from their beginnings in the early 70s, The Eagles could all boast that, along with having an embarrassment of riches in the singing department, all four of their members contributed as writers. Even as personnel changed, each new member of the group came with writing chops.
Nonetheless, as the decade progressed, the duo of Don Henley and Glenn Frey started to take on the lion’s share of the songwriting. On Hotel California, the two were involved in writing seven of the nine tracks on the epic album.
Frey admitted after the fact that “The Last Resort”, although credited to both men, was mostly Henley’s song. Most of the album focused on Southern Californians as they were in the mid-70s, living hard and fast and often coming to regret it later on down the road.
On the last song, however, Henley focused on the history of the area. He depicted the land as it once was, pristine and filled with the wonders of nature. But as people started to settle in the area, they blindly brought with them the blight that damaged the environment and subtly robbed the area of much of what made it so special in the first place.
Exploring the Lyrics of “The Last Resort”
Henley starts “The Last Resort” on a micro level, detailing the cross-country trip of a young Rhode Island girl to the West Coast. “She packed her hopes and dreams like a refugee,” the narrator explains. After mentioning the Native Americans who were once the main inhabitants of the land, the girl takes her place with her other travelers: “And they came from everywhere to The Great Divide/Seeking a place to stand and a place to hide.”
The narrator then shifts to a more modern perspective, detailing the pleasure-seekers in the local bars. That’s when he first starts to castigate the so-called “progress” made in the area. “They call it paradise, I don’t know why,” he sneers. “Somebody laid the mountains low while the town got high.”
“Some rich men came and raped the land, nobody caught ‘em,” Henley sings. “Put up a bunch of ugly boxes and, Jesus, people bought ‘em.” After a stirring instrumental interlude, Henley returns to sarcastically suggest that the folks tired of California can take their destructive ways to Hawaii.
No punches are pulled in the final section. “’Cause there is no more new frontier,” Henley explains of the limits of Manifest Destiny. “But we have got to make it here/We satisfy our endless needs and justify our bloody deeds/In the name of destiny and in the name of God.”
That leads to a vision of all the denizens of California belting out their church songs as the land crumbles around them. “They call it paradise, I don’t know why,” Henley summarizes. “You call someplace paradise/Kiss it goodbye.” And so “The Last Resort”, the most damning hymn you’ll ever hear, bids farewell to the quintessential California album.
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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